


Subterranean

by versaphile



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode: s04e06 The Doctor's Daughter, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-13
Updated: 2008-05-13
Packaged: 2017-11-25 10:53:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/638139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/versaphile/pseuds/versaphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten at the end of <i>The Doctor's Daughter</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Subterranean

He sits in the garden and doesn't weep.

Around him there is life, so much life. There's an end to war and the beginning of peace. There's Donna and Martha, keeping a respectful distance, giving him space to mourn. But none of it reaches him. There's no light breaking through the blackness inside him. He's past mourning.

Sometimes he wishes he'd never let Donna push her way back into his life. She'd decided that for him, packed and ready and standing in the TARDIS before he even got a word edgewise. Donna and her expectations, her insistence that he live up to them. _Save someone, anyone._ He can still taste the ashes of Pompeii in his mouth, still smell the poison gas of ATMOS. There are gunshots ringing in his ears.

But right now what he wants most is to be a child again, to be able to run up the mountainside in tears and find solace in an odd little monk. To see a garden in a daisy, in bare rock and lichen, when now he looks at a garden and sees nothing. As he stares at the cooling body of his daughter (his _daughter_ ) and can no longer distinguish one pain from another. It hurts so much he can't even grieve.

It seems all he can do anymore is inspire people to die. Why didn't she _live_? She's not the Master, wasn't trying to hurt him by refusing to regenerate. She should have lived. If he'd been shot, he would have regenerated and then he'd be a different man but he'd still have her, still love her. She'd still have a dad. But there's no name for what he is, a childless father, a widower to his people over and over. 

Her death is his fault. His willingness to die for others, his faulty genetics. She was too much like him, refusing to go on when he's the one that's tired of living. 

He hears Donna and Martha talking about him in hushed whispers. They don't know he can hear every concerned word. Martha thinks they should take Jenny away, thinking like a doctor used to hiding away the dead in morgues, thinking like a friend who saw him wailing over the Master's corpse, cradling it in his arms for far longer than was healthy. There's a brief argument, and then Donna walks over and sits down beside him. 

He expects her to start pushing him to open up and braces himself against it. But instead she simply takes his hand and holds it. A squeeze and then a steady pressure. No expectations, no demands, just understanding. He looks into her eyes and sees gentle sympathy and he has to look away.

"I'm sorry," she says.

He nods, unable to speak.

She takes a breath, starts to say more, some kindness about honouring Jenny's memory or how it's better to have loved and lost. But she stops herself, sighs. Rests her head on his shoulder and keeps holding his hand.

They sit together in silence. It doesn't make surviving any easier, but it helps him shed a few tears.


End file.
